While doing some tank maintainance (seems like I'm ALWAYS doing that!) one of my hermits cruised by the front glass sporting what I now have ID'd as bubble algae on it's shell. 4 bubbles to be exact. I looked over the LR and found a couple more. I've briefly looked around on RC for info and found several things.
1) Algae = bad. Remove at once
2) Bubble algae is a sign of good water quality. 3) Don't break the bubbles!
4) Get an emerald crab to eat them for you.
I plan on doing all of the above but I was just wondering if anybody else can tell me anything about this? I'd appreciate it!!!

Also, if you think bubble algae on a hermit is bad - wait until you see one of my turbos. No kidding, it looks like one of those WWII helmets with all the camo twigs and stuff sticking out of it! I'll have to post a picture...

We had it start popping up in one of our tanks, threw a couple of emeralds in and they seemed to keep it in check, until we noticed them nipping on clam mantles, then they had to go. Total explosion after that. Needless to say, all that rock got yanked today and it's in a rubbermaid with a skimmer. Going to let it run for awhile and hopefully the skimmer will clean the water up good and hopefully it starts dying back. If not, to the back yard it goes, let it all die off, and use it as base rock down the road. Probably 'cook' it after the yard. Hopefully it will rememdy the problem.

Emeralds can be hit or miss. Good luck and try to stay on top of it, cause it can spread like wildfire.

Great. Not looking forward to that but thanks for the reply. Do you know if it is the result of the same stuff that causes other algae or are they brought on by something else? I finally started getting all my other algae's in check and then this showed up. I just bought a phosphate kit so I'll check that tonight.

I'd like to find the cause/source and fix that rather than try and keep it in check for the rest of my life...or the aquarium's! I guess that's the $64,000 question...

Emerald crabs will eat the little balls. You can carefully pick off the larger ones. I've had good luck w/ emeralds; they've never gone after the corals.
I keep at least 2 in my 90 and rarely find any. Good luck. Nancy

like everyone else who has good water quality but unfortunately are suffering from bubble algae, I treid all I can including emerald crab. The outcome is that my emerald crab is eating everything but bubbles. I did couple things:
1. locate te bubbles and turned the liverock upside down thus the algae didn't receive anymore sunlight.
2. using a tweeser, carefully removed the larger ones and popped them outside the tank.
3. Moved the hermit crab who was carrying the bubbles around to my quaranteen tank, which was relatively dim in lighting.

There are two species of common bubble algaes in my tank. The large circular ones grow fast and spread ferociously, but the smaller oval shaped ones stay relatively small and doesn't really go anywhere else. You mayalso try shading the bubble algae with an existing rock or coral to demote growth.